to stop. When she reached the bottom step, she didn't hesitate a beat, just waded into the water.
Two concrete landing piers rose a couple of feet above the water in the middle of the slip-another part of the design plan that hadn't been thought through, since there was no way of reaching them without getting soaked. Goodhue was slogging toward the closer of them, in up to her knees now. I ran down the steps and waded in after her; the water felt icy through my athletic shoes.
Goodhue reached the pier and clung to it, arms outstretched above her head. Waves lapped at her waist and sprayed the back of her tan suit jacket. I moved toward her, fighting a strong current. She was crying, clawing at the concrete with her fingernails. When I came up behind her and grasped her by the shoulders, she flinched.
'Come on, Jess,' I said. 'Out of the water. We'll both catch pneumonia.'
She sobbed and rolled her head from side to side, face pressed against the rough surface of the pier. 'Jess!' I shook her.
She muttered something I couldn't understand. 'What?'
'Don't care.'
'Stop it!' I yanked on her shoulders, dragged her upright. She sagged against me. I slipped my right arm around her, extending the other for balance, and began guiding her back toward the steps. My feet were numb now. Halfway to the steps, she stumbled, and we both nearly went down. 'Walk, dammit!' I said.
She walked. But when we got to the steps, she sagged again and sat down. 'Jess,' I said, 'get up!'
She shook her head and doubled over, arms wrapped around her bare knees. Her pale skirt was molded to her thighs, water streaming off it. In spite of her soaking she didn't seem to feel the wet or the chill. Finally I took off my jacket and draped it around her shoulders, then sat a little way down, avoiding the puddles forming around her. I couldn't single-handedly wrestle her to warmth and shelter. It was obvious she wouldn't help me, and nobody else had been drawn to the vicinity by the sight of two wet, struggling women. At least not yet.
I fumbled in my damp shoulder bag and came up with a couple of reasonably clean tissues. Pressed them into her hand. She took them, scrubbed at her face, and blew her nose.
'What was all that about?' I asked her.
She didn't reply, merely hunched over, clasping her knees again.
'Well, I think I know,' I added. 'But maybe it's not that bad. Let's talk about it, see what can be done.'
'There's nothing that can be done. I want to die.'
I doubted her wading into the bay had been a suicide attempt; more likely she'd been running in blind panic- both from having to face me and having to deal with what had happened. I said, 'You don't want to die, and you don't know there's no solution. Come on, we'll go back to the studio and talk this through.'
This time she let me help her to her feet. When we reached the promenade, we encountered Les Gates and the bald man from the assignment desk, who had come out looking for us. Together the two men and I got Goodhue back to her dressing room. Gates and the other man didn't want to leave us, but Goodhue dismissed them-a bit imperiously, I thought, for someone who had recently been wallowing and crying in the bay. While she changed into dry things, I went to my car and carried in the overnight bag I keep in the trunk in case an investigation unexpectedly takes me out of town. Finally we sat down to talk, me clad in a fresh sweater and jeans, Goodhue wrapped in a warm robe.
I said, 'Jess, there are extenuating circumstances in Grant's death. I noticed you'd written down Harry Sullivan's number. A good lawyer like him-'
'Can get me off,' she finished. 'But my life's wrecked, anyway. My career. And how can I live with what I did? I keep seeing him…'
'Tom Grant-your father.'
After a moment she nodded, bending her head so I couldn't see her face.
'You picked up the report on the background investigation of your mother Tuesday afternoon-'
Now she looked up. 'How did you-'
'Doesn't matter now. You read in the report that a man named Andy Wrightman was your father. Later that afternoon I called and mentioned that one of the other heirs had said something about the 'right man' when I'd described Tom Grant to him. So you decided to go see Grant, but you didn't tell him the real reason why you were making the appointment. Did you claim you wanted to interview him for another story?'
'… Yes.'
'And what happened when you went to his house?'
She sighed deeply. 'Why go into it? The end result is the same.'
'You're going to have to talk about it sooner or later. There's no way I can withhold this kind of information from the police.'
Goodhue stared off into the shadows, her face reflected murkily in the unlit mirror above her dressing table. For some reason I was reminded of D.A. Taylor staring at Hog Island, and I knew Goodhue's thoughts were as bleak as those Taylor entertained. In spite of what I'd said earlier about her not really wanting to die, I was afraid for Jess. I wanted to yank her back to the present, reintegrate this new, fragile personality with the strong, confident woman she had been until two days before. But I doubted my ability to do so.
Finally she turned her gaze to me. 'Why do you need to know these things?'
'I want to help you, if I can. And as I told you on Monday, the truth is important to me.'
After a moment she said, 'All right, then-the truth. I went to his house right after the early-evening broadcast. No one saw me leave the studio; they just assumed I was resting in my dressing room. I'd got myself all prettied up.' Her lips twisted in bitter self-mockery. 'Daddy's little girl, wanting to make a good impression. But there was something about his manner… I couldn't ask him right off. We had a drink in his office. I was trying to think of a way to get into it. I asked him about those horrible… what did he call them?'
'Fetishes.'
She closed her eyes, swallowed. 'Disgusting things. And the way he talked about them… it was very calculated, for shock effect. He took me out in the backyard to his workshop, showed me the… stuff he made them from, the one that he had in progress. And then… oh, Jesus!'
'What, Jess?'
'The bastard came on to me. His own daughter. And that's when I just blurted it out.'
'What was his reaction?'
'At first he was very surprised-more, I think, because I knew. I suspected he'd known all along. He didn't bother to deny he'd known my mother, or that his real name was Andy Wrightman. Then he became defensive, nervous. Said I was mistaken, he couldn't be my father, because he'd left Berkeley before I was born. I'd brought the detective's report along, and I showed it to him. He read it and laughed- forced laughter. He said of course Jenny would have told her conservative friend that she knew who my father was, but in reality she was a tramp who fucked everybody. There was no way, he said, that she could have figured out whose child I was.'
'Did you believe him?'
'No. When you've interviewed as many people as I have, you get so you can sense when someone's lying. Well, I guess you would know that, too.'
'Did you ask him if he was the man who came to see you at Ben and Nilla's?'
She bent forward, resting her face against her open palms. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. 'He admitted he was. Said my mother needed someone to drive her there, so he went along. He told me I'd been a cute little thing, the way I'd sat on his lap and played with the ends of the string tie his peace medallion was clipped to.'
So that was the medallion the collective had broken up to make 'talismans.' I thought of the small metal protrusions on the backs of the two pieces I had in my purse, which would have held the string.
Goodhue added, 'And then it all came back to me so clearly: the big gray metal clip, and above it his face-the way he looked back then. And I also very clearly saw my mother kneeling beside us, looking prettier than I'd ever seen her, saying, 'Honey, this is your father.'' She was silent a moment, crying quietly. Then she raised her tear- wet face.
'The way he spoke, I thought he might be softening toward me. But when I told him what I remembered my mother saying, he started to attack her character again. Said that in addition to being a roundheels, she was mentally unstable, that she'd been breaking down long before the thing at Port Chicago, which was why she testified against the others. Afterward, when just the two of them were living at the flat in the Fillmore, she kept talking about suicide, and finally she took the gun they had left and… you know.'
